Credit: Found On Internet

As Glasgow’s Sons and Daughters are winding up a vast UK tour, their guitarist and singer Scott Paterson takes a breather to catch up with Music Towers. Evidently, the tour has been a big success: “It’s been really really fun,” says a delighted Paterson. “The last time we toured was March 2006 and this has been a really long British tour - 29 dates! So we’re right back into it with gusto. All the shows have been so great. Some places we were really not sure about like Southend-on-Sea. It’s the place that Morrissey’s ‘Everyday Is Like Sunday’ is based on. We were like, ‘Oh, my God. This is going to be horrendous.’ But it turned out to be one of our favourite nights. The crowd went absolutely crazy. It tends to be the odd gigs in the really weird venues that are most fun.”

The quartet is looking forward to the January release of ‘This Gift’ (out on Domino Recordings), the follow-up to 2005’s ‘The Repulsion Box’. Surprisingly, ‘This Gift’ has been produced by Bernard Butler, known for his ‘belts and braces’ approach to production. The current single, ‘Gilt Complex’, is the LP’s first taster. “The reason we chose it as the first single is we thought it’d be the perfect cross between the last records and the new record,” Scott explains. “The new record is really different. It’s a bigger, better record. Sonically ‘Gilt Complex’ shows you what the new record sounds like although the songwriting is closer to the last record.”

That said, this combination of Butler and Sons And Daughters’ darkly intense, stripped-down, stompable songs does sound an awkward one. Paterson reveals just how rocky that relationship was; “I’m a big fan of Butler’s. I think he’s a fantastic guitarist, an incredibly talented musician but we weren’t after that McAlmont & Butler production. He’s very good at that modern Phil Spector thing. This record isn’t as lush as that.  It’s something we did have a lot of arguments about. We’d try to rein it back, keep a bit of grit in there and he’d try to push the lush side of it. We were trying to go for a pop record in the sense The Specials was pop, that Blondie was pop. Eventually, he understood that. That’s what we really wanted to go for, where it’s really catchy but has a great lyrical side to it. It’s definitely not smooth.